Scrum Masters vs. Robots…No, No I’m not saying to replace Scrum Masters with robots. I’m saying Scrum Masters make Great Coaches or Mentors for School Clubs. This was going to be a big agile experiment for me and the kids. Keep in Mind School Clubs are completely different from teaching class, coaching a sports team or being a parent. Clubs are where the students are in charge of what happens in their group and not the managers, coaches, mentors, teachers or parents. Oh Joy Self-Organized Teams ! The perfect Community Volunteer activity for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches.
This year I volunteered to coach a chess club and a robotics club at my children’s school. I had no idea as to what I was getting into but I learned much and I will be posting blogs on what I learned in separate posts.
For the robotics activity we did not have much time. I was only available to coach 1 day a week for 1 hour (due to after school time). My manager was nice enough to allow me to leave early from work to meet with the kids by 3pm and yes I made up the time later that night.. We had Holidays, snow days and Eagles Superbowl parade that play havoc with plans. So when I reflect on how much time they had it was 10 hours to build robots for the competition.
Self Organizing Team approach Resulted in: 2 Robots, 1 extra set of engines, two controllers, a notebook presentation (1/2 finished), a 5 minute presentation and video in 10 hours of work.
This was the result from 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade kids and not Adults!
As a scrum master / coach, I did what we normally do. One the first day I created an agenda and some initial rules and the facilitated the discussions and activities. I would capture the output by the kids and share it back with them, their parents and Principal. The only other thing I did was build a calendar schedule but that was mostly for me, my partner coach, parents and again the Principal. We had to know when to bring in the drills, pipe cutters, soldering irons, etc.. as these were kids who never worked with dangerous tools. Safety is very important.
Here is the first meeting agenda, that I created:
Our first club Meeting:
Agenda:
• Introductions
• Talk about material
• Creating a log book or books
• Make a team working agreement that is agreed to by everyone
• Identify subteams of 3 to 5 people per team
• Watch some videos on Seaperch
• Ask lots of questions
Take home for next meeting:
• General needs:
o Read materials
o Assemble write ups
o Meet as a subteam
o Present findings as a team at the next meeting
• Topics:
o For everyone please go through websites for seaperch and have a list of questions to cover
o See this link for information on the topic below and they are all YouTube videos so there is not much reading to do http://www.phillynavalstem.com/resources.html
o For everyone:
Introduction to SeaPerch – Everyone as individual to review and write comments and questions
o Pick a topic for each team:
Forces at Work
Properties
Electricity
Fluids
Conductivity and Corrosion (1/2)
Conductivity and Corrosion (2/2)
Operating Your SeaPerch
o Please feel free to read the teaching materials also as there is lots of neat stuff we are going to learn together
General Rules to Start With:
• Start on time
• Let’s your teammates and coaches know if you can’t make it
• Respect each other’s ideas
• Don’t talk down to your teammates
• It is ok to make mistakes or you don’t learn
• No cell phones or side conversations during teaching or lesson time
• Always ask permission before video capturing people
• Etc.. to be determined (TBD) by the team
The Chess Club came up with these working agreements:
General Rules of Sportsmanship by the Team:
• Start on time
• Don’t get Mad
• Shake Hands
• No Fighting
• No names, trash talk and no making fun of people
• Be Nice
• Don’t Throw Pieces / No Board Flipping
• No Making Distracting Sounds
With the general rules set we started learning and building. The 2nd meeting we set up giant tubs from home depot because we don’t have pools in South Philly inner city schools.
Just like in the office, I had to bring the robotics team to their working agreement, because in one of our sessions they just messed around for 10 minutes causing a late start. So in the next session I took 10 minutes back from them to talk about:
- What is a Club about?
- How is a club different from class, sports or being home with parents?
Response on Club:
- Group sharing Interests
- Gather to Do Stuff
- To Learn
- Socialize
- Make Eye contact
Response to how is a club different:
- Fun
- One Purpose Ony
- Teach Different Stuff
- My Input – Was that it was their Club and I was only there to help. As I was not allowed to build anything nor compete for them. It was all theirs. I was not there to tell them what to do.
As the scrum master / coach my job was to remove barriers. The people at the Philadelphia Independence Seaport Museum ( http://www.phillyseaport.org/ ) were nice enough to allow SeaPerch team to rent their tank. My job was to reserve the tank and pre-checkout the location, so I knew what we were getting into.
Sometime the scrum master / mentor’s job is create real world situations, so I would quietly walk by and unplug the battery a few times to simulate competition issues and learn trouble shooting.
During tank testing, the up and down engine failed. So I had to guide them in the art of troubleshooting and testing. But we also have to let them experience failure.
As you can see I let them build stuff as the blue wire was between the orange engine wires that the just repaired and soldered in place. As I inspected we all realized that they had to rework the engines.
We still have a week before the competition, but the Self Organizing Team of 10 and 13 year old kids were able to learn about organizing, cutting pipes, drilling holes, soldering circuits, building engines, troubleshooting and competing in 10 hours of work.
The Agile Manifesto
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Happy Clubbing,
Greg
